Tulsa Rocketry Club hosts rocket launch at Pawhuska Airport

PAWHUSKA, Okla. — Hundreds of people are heading to Pawhuska this weekend to launch rockets.

Tulsa Rocketry Club is hosting an amateur rocket launch where fans can safely blast off their rockets.

The club said they hope it will encourage more kids and young people to get into rocketry.

The event is at the Pawhuska Municipal Airport

Nine-year-old Karson Thomas is from Pawhuska, he’s been building rockets for 3 years and sent one up at “The High Frontier High Power Rocket Launch.”

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“Launching rockets just like in my mind just looked cool… It’s really fun it’s cool to watch,” said Thomas.

Sixteen-year-old Gabriel Stout is from Skiatook, he’s been building rockets for 4 years.

“It’s like really fun...and interactive and science-y,” Stout said.

Tulsa Rocketry said they want to get more young people interested in rockets and want families to see and learn about them.

Andrew Lathrop is from the club. He said rockets give kids a wide variety of things to learn and explore.

“When kids are learning about rockets they may learn about different applications in science and math, they learn maybe a little bit about the weather...you use little computers, little flight computers, that tell us how fast the rocket went, how high the rocket went, where it’s landed, things like that, so when a kid starts doing rockets they have a whole wealth of things they can explore,” Lathrop said.

Lathrop’s been building an eight foot tall rocket since March to launch at the event. He said it should go really high.

“Estimated about 11,000 feet, it’s a scale model scale rocket of a real rocket,” he said.

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Lathrop said there’s more interest in rockets again because of SpaceX and NASA’s Artemis program.

“People see that, think ‘that’s cool, that’s neat, I want to try that, I want to do that,’ and this is as close as you can get to that without actually doing all that stuff,” he said.

FOX23 spoke to people young and old at the event.

“It’s really fun just seeing it,” said Roman Holt.

“This is where adults get to be kids and live out their dreams of going out into space,” said Devin Thompson.

The message from the event: rockets are out of this world!

If you want to learn more about the event and rocketry, click here.

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